Five minutes after it happened, Twitter was still in flames, cars were honking, bars were shaking like there’d been an earthquake, ESPN was breaking down in tears. If you spoke Spanish, or were my dad, there was a good chance you’d just heard this. Yahoo! Sports was crashing. My dad, who’s not really a soccer fan, was stuck in the car, couldn’t find the game on English-language radio, and spent 90 minutes trying to follow the Spanish commentary; he called me after the match to find out if what he thought had happened was real. But that was how everyone felt. It’s scary to think how things might have looked if anyone here cared about soccer.
This is a post about happiness and the things people say in voiceovers. That may be a letdown, or an erosion. But joy, the actual joy of being a fan, is an essential part of sports, and it’s something we haven’t written much about here, for various, obvious reasons. The whole topic of emotion has been so crushed out of shape by sportscasters that it’s basically just another beer ad, and most days, it’s well to one side of what this site is trying to do. Still, it matters, and there are days when a good feeling just hits you in the mouth.
I’ve been reading match reports—you know, the analytic, intelligent, fullbacks-were-used, the-universe-didn’t-explode-into-radiant-particles variety—and I have a feeling of simultaneously understanding them and not understanding them, like a patient who’s too drugged to follow his own diagnosis. There’s another order of reality, and it’s sheared off the top of the sky. It’s incandescent. I have a broken jaw, and all my perceptions are beautiful.
Anyway, that wasn’t a soccer game, in the same way that shattered glass isn’t a window. It a pile of jagged moments. Djebbour controlling the ball in the air and roundhousing it at the goal. Dempsey with his beaten lip. Yebda, his peroxide mohawk flashing in the floodlights, letting rip from 40 yards. Altidore smashing his way through the Algerian back line, a bowling ball in a bowling ball shop. Dempsey and Altidore swinging at the same ball, with flawless slapstick timing. Dempsey narrowly missing, Dempsey narrowly missing, Dempsey narrowly missing. That unchanging scoreline from the England game, while the time on the clock kept climbing. Finally, Tim Howard making the instantly legendary throw that opened up the American attack, Algeria frantically tracking back, Altidore crossing for Dempsey in the area, Dempsey just half-able to lay the ball off as M’Bohli smothered him, Donovan crashing into view, Donovan getting to the rebound, Donovan smashing it in.
It’s so easy to frame a list of reasons why you want to scream at a moment like that that it almost feels pointless to list them. Transcending alienation to achieve community through the ecstasy of simulated warfare, or acquiring a false sense of power over the universe through the realization of a wish, or whatever sublimated tribalism/tragedy of civilization thesis your advisor wants you to write. Or just the relief of unbearable suspense. These aren’t cliches, but they’re familiar enough mechanisms that you can be more or less conscious of them and of how they work in the instant you want to start screaming. Or I should say, simultaneously with the instant you hear yourself, because you’re screaming anyway, or at least I am, and you probably knock over a table, and when it’s clear that it’s real, it isn’t going to be called back for offside or a foul real or imagined or a ten-month-old Serena Williams foot fault, you probably start dancing like an idiot, whether alone or in company, or crying for no reason, or calling up everyone you know. Again, that power isn’t the only thing that matters in sports, there are other sources of significance, but it’s at the root of everything epic or mythical or poetic that sometimes appears in the game. Hold on, did I really say joy was to one side of what this site is all about?
The World Cup may be about competing visions of nationalism vaguely subsumed by a narrative of human unity, but yesterday said nothing about the American national character, unless, as Zach speculates, it was that America excels at incorporating influences. Winning a game isn’t inherently an act either of definition or of reception, and Michael Jordan’s shadow would fall off Landon’s shoulders like a coat twelve sizes too large. Still, in the unfiltered moment, maybe just because there’s a national filter at the World Cup, maybe because it’s what the crypto-fascist overlords who arrange these circuses want, you do perceive it as something to do with the country; you’re aware of who you’re celebrating with, at any rate. And because the classifying brain is irrational, the classifying brain gives it a specific historical context. It was a weird quote, but in the first, overjoyed moment after the goal, nothing made more sense than DaMarcus Beasley’s exclaiming, “We bring something to the table, the American people as a whole.” It was as if Louis Armstrong, Emily Dickinson, and Howard Hawks had come raining down in a crazy confetti on the grass.
Is there anything to take from all this? Probably only that sometimes, a gong crashes, or else we’re all just puppets. But it’s amazing how the most natural way to describe intense elation is by comparing it to violent disaster. You want to start talking, absurdly, about hurricanes and hailstorms, at what is legitimately a good moment in anyone’s life. If a weatherman told me tomorrow that a tornado of Donovan’s-goal proportions was bearing down on my house, I would think it was an appalling thing to say. But I would also run for cover, because I would know exactly what he meant.
by Brian Phillips · June 24, 2010
I also had to listen to the Spanish language broadcast in the car, unable to find English speaking radio coverage in Boston and opting for Spanish over Portugese. Had to check ESPN Scorezone on my iPhone while doing 70 in an F350 on the highway to ensure my suspicion that the US had indeed scored and it wasn’t Algeria. It was a moment of sheer joy. I haven’t had that sick in my stomach feeling that I had during the 2nd half when it looked as though we’d fail yet again to advance during a sporting event in a long time. I was borderline high when I found out we scored. Great post, too.
Joy, emotion, happiness: You heard all of that an more from everyone sitting on my floor here in Bristol watching as fans at ESPN.
God, you are good. fantastic post. I and my friend turned into children again when we scored. all we could do is yell and laugh in alternating rhythms and jump around the room. sheer joy.
how apt that the paragraph about screaming made me shriek out loud. (with joy, of course.)
when he scored, i threw my hat against the wall and lifted my chair over my head. i was alone in my apartment.
I, too, listened on my car radio to the Spanish play-by-play. I would not have believed a human being could have talked so fast for so long. I could not understand a word of what was being said, but my heart was racing 100 MPH. When the announcer started shouting “Goooooal!” I was torn between sheer joy and complete dread, because I didn’t know who had scored. Then I heard the words “Landon Donovan” and I knew. Like your father, Brian, I’m not much of a soccer fan. But I became one yesterday.
If Paul Caligiuri’s goal in 1990 was the goal heard around the world, was this Donovan goal the one heard ’round the US of A?
I’ve been a sports fan since youth. Strangely, I have never come close to tears of joy because of a sports match.
I came very close after this one.
Epic post. The Andres Cantor call was unreal. Pure emotion.
My wife got misty-eyed and red-faced. I got a good view of it because I was trying to pick myself out from the ceiling I jumped through when I saw the goal go in. I paused to make sure there was no phantom foul or new FIFA rule that prohibited US goals in stoppage time.
And then I screamed. Pumped my fists. Shook my head. Tried to reconcile my joyful disbelief with the apparent reality of my joy.
I celebrated.
I lack the ability to express my thoughts, but stupidly I will try. It was a fantastically compelling match, as all three US matches have been, resulting in my begrudging support.
I just can’t help but fell uneasy at the prospect of USMNT success attracting the “not really a soccer fan” hoards, with their USA!USA!USA! chants, and feeble knowledge of the game, its history, or its customs.
I think I realize, Brian, you are expressing, to some extent, similar concerns: about bandwagon triumphalism and “crypto-fascism”, but are finding in it all some true community.
Maybe it was that I was watching it in a bar 2 blocks from Wall St. (in some sort of act of self-flagellation), but I can’t past the feeling of exploitation. I am not a USMNT fan, yet I feel an (I’m sure) unwanted sympathy for them.
I know I’m projecting, but assuming soccer-fandom arises at least in part from some sort of vaguely lefty, internationalist spirit, were I a fan, I wouldn’t want these NFL day-trippers at my party.
I lost my damn mind for a good day and a half after this match. You got a good part of it right, that this victory, all things considered, is not a defining point on the USA. It was, in a strange way, though, a defining point on ME, a USA soccer FAN, and someone who had played for a long time.
Also, the phrase, “a bowling ball in a bowling ball shop” might be the best way I’ve ever heard someone describe Altidore’s current playing style.
@Paul_Brooklyn All respect, but that’s a crazy attitude and you should shake it out of your crazy head. I don’t care whether soccer ever gets big in America, but I also can’t sign off on its being a secret codespace for sophisticated urban liberals. First, because you’re already sharing it with some of the worst people in the world (Franco, Lazio fans) so worrying about NASCAR dads is beside the point. Second, because it’s lame to say you don’t want Republicans to read Shakespeare. Third, because pseudo-hardcore fans who’ve been into the game for two years and act like seasoned hooligans are as annoying as any gleeful bandwagon-jumper. I definitely worry about sport’s susceptibility to political exploitation, but for the most part, if NFL daytrippers want to expose themselves to something amazing and beautiful (and inherently internationalist) I say be glad they’re in the spirit.
Next post: “On Unhappiness.”
Superbly put. I have always thought that football is about how you feel at 5 o’clock on a given saturday night. Whatever division the side you supports is in at that moment, a win, and in particular, a good win, will charge your mood, leave you just that little bit skippier. Hence, we see fans of teams like Manchester and Norwich Cities flock to watch their team even when relegated to the third tier of English football: it doesn’t matter if it’s a victory over Macclesfield or Liverpool that has been chalked up: you suddenly feel better. In a World Cup context, the US may now be out but the joy you describe after Landon’s goal will still occupy a place in memories for years to come. From an English point of view, one of my best World Cup memories was the astonishment felt and the explosion of joy when Michael Owen tore through Argentina in 1998. Nevermind that England lost the match on penalty: leaping up and down like a loon in a North London pub was fantastic.
I completely terrified my coworker who came in to consult on a project with me. I was half-reading her paper, half-eyeing the computer screen where the game was streaming. She talked, I split my vision, and then, bursting out with that very joy you wrote about, I interrupted her, crying, “Oh! Oh! Yes!” She jumped about three feet in the air and I watched Donovan slide into the corner flag as I apologized and tried to help her get her heartbeat back to normalcy.
It was a great moment. And I’d written off the US, thinking I didn’t care if they made it far.